About the Project

Street Photography Now Project is a collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of Street Photography Now (Thames & Hudson).

Each week from 1 October 2010, a leading contemporary street photographer issued a new Instruction, written to inspire fresh ways of looking at and documenting the world we live in. Over the following six days, photographers around the world were invited to upload one photograph in response to a special Flickr Group.

The project has run for 52 weeks, ending with the last Instruction issued on the 23rd September 2011. During this time the project has received over 16,000 images uploaded from countries including China, Japan and South Korea, Brazil and Argentina, USA, Russia, Australia, UAE, Morocco and all across Europe, including of course the many submissions from the UK.

The aim was to build a global community of photographers exploring the rewards and challenges of documenting public life, an aim that has been more than fulfilled.

Though not a competition, at the end of the Project two photographers have been chosen who made the most outstanding contribution to the Project across a number of weeks – Jo Paul Wallace and Jack Simon They are each awarded £500 of Thames & Hudson books and have their work displayed in an online exhibition on The Photographers’ Gallery’s website.

The Street Photography Now Project was launched in September 2010, as The Photographers’ Gallery closed its doors for the redevelopment of its building on Ramillies Street. The Photographers’ Gallery will reopen in early 2012.

A note on the website from our designers Europa: “The Street Photography Now Project instructions are colour coded in line with the weather conditions on the day of their issue, giving photographers an indication of the lighting conditions that they will be subjecting themselves and their lenses to. The colours vary with temperature from red down to blue and with sunlight from full saturation down to grey. So for a freezing cloudy day expect the instruction to be set on a bluey grey background and for a scorching sunny week expect to see a bright, vivid red.”